After departing Telluride, we drove to our final destination of Durango, CO.  We drove on Hwy 550 and completed the San Juan Skyway Scenic Byway loop that we started at the beginning of our trip. The section of the road between Ouray and Silverton is called the Million Dollar Highway and it is breathtaking. This a very twisty and turny road with multiple 10 MPH hairpin turns with literal sheer drop-offs and no shoulder or guardrails. Several of the tight switchback turns look as if the highway pavement is cantilevered from the edge of the mountain with no ground underneath supporting it. I am sure the engineers back in the 1880’s when this highway was built fully considered the weight of modern vehicles, right? I drove with my eyes glued to the road and Tony spent his time looking out the window ohing and awing. Words aren’t sufficient to describe what a lovely part of this country this is, but trust me that it is spectacular and should be added as a must do if you are in the area (and aren’t afraid of heights).

We are first-time visitors to Durango and it reminds us of a west coast mountain version of Chattanooga, TN. Durango is a bit sprawled out, is hilly more than mountainous, there are some zoning irregularities and inconsistencies, is very car dependent and appears to be dealing with a homeless crisis but there is also a distinctive charm about this place. The historic downtown area is cute with lots of local restaurants, coffee houses and shops. There was a plethora of hiking and biking trails from which to choose. The lovely Animas River runs through town and is heavily used for SUP and kayaking. There is 7 miles of a hard surface multi-purpose trail going right through the middle of the city. The people we met were quite friendly and they had a lot of dogs. Tony had several enjoyable bike rides and we hiked together on a portion of the Colorado Trail within the San Juan National Forest. Cool, shaded with consistent but gentle grades is just my kind of trail. We even met a nice man and his pittie on the trail who stopped and randomly chatted with us for almost ½ hour.

As our time in Durango came to a close, we both reflected on how fast this trip had gone. We had been gone for 28 days at this point. As our trip progressed, time seemed to speed up and our final days were almost a blur. We made the final 8-hour journey home taking backroads which included driving through Globe, AZ. We drove through this same area at the beginning of our trip, but now it looked like a completely different place. What was then green and alive had been completely ravaged by wildfires that swept across Northern Arizona in recent weeks.

We arrived home to our Arizona “basecamp” and the unpleasant job of unpacking. Our van contents literally exploded into our front hallway. There are numerous knee-high piles of laundry to do, several loads of kitchenware to be washed/sanitized and hours of organizing and cleaning needed. We both had our first real shower in almost a month and slept like babies that night in our king-sized bed in our perfectly air-conditioned house. These luxuries feel even more luxurious after car-camping for over a month. We are home but already gearing up for Road Trip #2 to the Midwest which we are calling our “Friends and Family Tour”. We leave in just a few short weeks.

Below are some my final random thoughts from our trip:

• Our van is awesome. It is not perfect and only 90% complete, but it is still awesome to us. It is small and nimble and it can fit in a regular parking space even in the tightest of parking lots. We averaged 18 MPG on this trip. We were concerned that we had only the base engine and it might struggle on the mountain passes, but it was fine and was not an issue. I have a “honey-do” list of 20+ things that need to be upgraded, completed or modified. How many will we get done before our next trip? Time will tell but it is directly correlated to Tony’s motivation level.
• We met many people on this trip and this really is the gift of traveling. While there were many people like us that were “doing” vanlife, retired or just on vacation, there were many people where living on the road was not a choice. We met people who have lost their homes and were now permanently living in their vehicles (cars, SUVs and RVs). One lady, in particular, we met in Aspen and she was living in her Toyota Camry in downtown Aspen. She was working full-time in a nearby boutique but could not afford housing in the area and therefore she was forced to live in her car. Tony and I live a privileged life in retirement and we are isolated from those that are struggling in our own current community. We don’t have the answers to this crisis, but it was much more evident to us on this trip that the wealth gap in our country is exploding. While we saw some of this when we lived on the road in 2012, the sheer increase in the number of people who are forced to live in their vehicles was chilling.
• In 2012, we parked Homer (who was big, brown and looked like an RV) pretty much anywhere we wanted to boondock or stealth camp and nobody bothered us. In 2021, we had a really hard time stealth camping and boondocking due to city ordinances prohibiting overnight parking and many closed Forest Service roads. We have now pivoted to Harvest Host and Boondockers Welcome to find places for legal overnight parking.
• We took the backroads for most of this trip and our drives were so much more enjoyable because of it. Sometimes it added only a few minutes to our trip but it was sometimes an hour or more and worth every minute of it. We saw small towns, lovingly cared for front gardens, wooden bridges and birds and wildlife. We saw a lot more driving at 50 mph on a 2-lane country road than driving 75 mph on an 8-lane interstate through endless miles of concrete jungle.
• Everywhere we traveled, but especially in the fancy mountain towns, there were “HELP WANTED” signs in most store or restaurant windows. In some places like Telluride, the signs didn’t just say Help Wanted, but said Help Wanted (housing provided).
• Tony and I prefer to cook and eat our own food vs. eating out. We are both vegan and I am also gluten-free and have food allergies (yep, I am that girl!) so eating out is hard and a bit risky for me. During this trip, I spent 1 morning each week prepping and cooking food we would eat for the remainder of the week. This worked out very well and we ate like kings (and queens) and certainly did not go hungry. I am able to cook many of the same dishes I make at home, but with a few less ingredients. FYI Secret – Sauces are a good way to jazz up basic food and make it seem more fancy.
• This is not a politically motivated comment, but mask wearing has pretty much come to a grinding halt, at least in the America we visited on this trip. In some of the fancier mountain towns, some people are still sporting masks, but in most of Arizona and Colorado they are completely non-existent in our experience. If <50% of eligible Americans have been vaccinated, how is nobody but us wearing a mask indoors anymore? Tony and I lean (overly)hard to the side to strict COVID-19 precautions as we still do curbside grocery delivery, just had our 1^st take-out meal in 16 months and still wear masks indoors when in public spaces even though we are fully vaccinated. We got more dirty looks, under the breath comments and even a person pretending to cough on us when we had on our masks. This particular coughing incident happened at a gondola which had giant signs everywhere stating masks were required per federal law since it is deemed public transportation. I don’t understand how wearing a mask, when indoors and in public, is such a hard thing to do, especially for the 50% of America that has not been vaccinated especially with the Delta variant circulating so widely. It really befuddles and frustrates me.
• At night on this trip, we resurrected our after-dinner Uno Hearts card game followed by an episode from the latest season from the Handmaid’s Tale. We also now have a new modem with 100 GB/month of AT&T broadband data so we had no problems downloading Hulu, Prime, Netflix, YouTube, podcasts and music and surfed the web with reckless abandon. Technology has greatly improved since our 2012 travel days.
• We feel so grateful to be able to travel again. Our plans were not to be in the US but to be in Europe or at least Canada with the van this summer, but we are just so happy to be traveling anywhere at this point. What a beautiful country we have.